Liebster Award

I don’t exactly understand the line of reasoning that led to what is happening right now, but it seems like someone is being nice to me again. Willgu29 of Think and Do has been almost inadvisably kind to nominate me for the Liebster award–inadvisable because once my ego reaches critical mass, the weight of my own self-absorption might create a black hole.

Will is an excellent poet, and not visiting their blog and reveling in the limitless glory of their words would be tantamount to punting a puppy off a cliff into a sea of sharks with chainsaw teeth, so check it out.

Now onto the questions I am supposed to answer. I usually resist answering things like these completely truthfully because I don’t want people to know I’m both incredibly boring and as emotionally deep as your standard issue copy machine, but I will persevere for the sake of the nice person who nominated me.

What is your favorite word? Why?Use, and I’ve scared at least one student with my passion for it. I teach freshman English at a university, and I’ve had to re-learn something I knew from a different perspective a few years ago: young people are laughably pretentious. I’ve seen more unnecessarily long words from my students than I even knew dictionaries had in stock. It’s difficult to read their writing out loud because I just don’t have the lung capacity to get through some of these sentences that sound like they were a joint project written by a thesaurus and a blender. The worst verbal culprit of writing like that is “utilize.” I’ve bled a dozen squids’ worth of ink explaining why “use” is a more pleasant, succinct option and why “utilize” is the written equivalent of using napalm to light a candle.

Invent a new word, what does it describe?Slunchy – adj – the wet, congealed texture of canned iguana food and the green goop at the bottom of old bags of spinach.

What is the first thing you’d want to tell someone about yourself?That no matter how engaged or jubilant I seem, I’d more than likely rather be somewhere else than talking to this person who seems intent on getting to know me.

What is the closest to last thing you’d want to tell someone about yourself?My address. I keep where I live hidden like an old pirate hides the source of their retirement fund from the pirate IRS; nobody needs to know where I live because nobody needs to visit.

Why do you write what you write?Oh gee, this one’s a doozy, and it’s going to make me sound like a terrible person. I write what I do because I like making myself laugh, and I know that I will always need to practice to be a better writer. My blog is an entirely self-serving endeavour. I use it to give myself something to giggle over, and I do it to keep improving because I know I’ll never be satisfied with myself if I don’t. That people seem to like my writing and take some joy out of that is one of the luckiest coincidences I’ve encountered, and it’s not one I predicted.

What if you couldn’t write? How would you choose to communicate?Well, I’d probably talk a lot. I might also just avoid communicating even more. I’d take not being able to write as licence to completely shut myself off from the world, and then I’d just tell jokes to my cat.

Tell me a lie.I don’t spend too much money on yogurt.

Tell me a truth.A stray cat I used to feed had 5 babies in my brother’s old car, and I named them A, B, C, D, and E because I thought that might keep me from getting attached to them. It didn’t work.

Tell me something that makes you not you.If I frolicked through my day with a skip in my step and a smile on my face.

What’s a question you would ask yourself?Why are you like this?

Answer the question: why are you like this?I spend a little too much time in my head, and a little too much of my childhood was spent reading instead of growing into a well-rounded socially viable individual. The damage is done, and now I’m a hermit with a decent vocabulary and a deeply disturbed imagination.

I’m nominating these nice people because they’re generally excellent writers.